Thursday, May 3, 2012
Jeff Neuman
How can Tiger turn it around? “If he ever asked me what I thought he needed to do, I’d tell him, look, go on the practice tee without anybody—without me, without Sean, without Haney, without a camera, and start hitting golf shots. Hit some high draws, some low draws, high fades, low fades, move the ball up and down, move it around; don’t worry about how you do it and go back to feeling it again. Quit playing golf-swing and just hit shots; just say to himself, I’m gonna hit a low fade, and I don’t need anybody to tell me how to do it, I’m just gonna feel it. He’s Tiger Woods, for God’s sake. He doesn’t know how to hit a shot?” Woods declined to comment.
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‘In My Opinion, He’s Very Robotic’
ReplyDeleteButch Harmon, Tiger Woods’s Coach From 1993-2004, Speaks Out on His Protégé—and Hank Haney
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303425504577355913365616018.html#articleTabs%3Darticle
by Jeff Neuman
Butch Harmon can’t go anywhere these days without someone asking him about Hank Haney’s current best-selling book, “The Big Miss,” about Haney’s six years working with Tiger Woods. Up until now, Harmon has kept his thoughts to himself.
ReplyDeleteHaney’s book contains some revelations about one of the world’s most celebrated athletes—like Woods’s obsession with the military, even training with the Navy SEALs.
Haney also sparked a debate about the confidentiality of the coaching relationship. Haney was raked over the coals by some for breaching it. Others shrugged: Coaches write books all the time, and absent a nondisclosure agreement, it’s called freedom of speech.
Harmon’s perspective is as a world-famous coach and instructor, a professional rival of Haney, and Woods’s coach for more than 10 years, starting in 1993 before his first U.S. Amateur title, through eight major-championship wins and perhaps the greatest stretch of golf anyone has ever played.
So what did he think of the book?
“I’m very surprised that he would write it,” Harmon said this week. “I’d never do that to Tiger or Greg [Norman] or any of the guys I’ve been with. We get to spend a lot of time with these people, sometimes even more time than their own families. Things are said, or you see different things, and it’s just—it is what it is, you just leave it where it belongs. I was really shocked to see him talk about Elin and Tiger’s kids and stuff like that, I don’t think that had any place in it.”
He went on: “It almost seems the way he has everything documented in there—too many times and dates and places that you wouldn’t come up with from memory—it’s like he kept precise notes all along with writing a book in mind.” Haney was unavailable, but his agent said the book wasn’t gossip but a portrait of Woods.
Harmon’s own experiences are enough for several books. He’s been at the epicenter of the pro-golf world for a couple of decades, working with Davis Love III, Greg Norman, Fred Couples, Ernie Els, Adam Scott, and now Dustin Johnson, Nick Watney and Phil Mickelson.
Like everyone else in golf, he has watched the struggles of his most famous former student. “For me, and I think we saw this at the Masters, he looks like he’s playing ‘golf- swing’ and not golf,” Harmon said. “In my opinion, he’s very robotic. And you could see that at Augusta with all his practice swings and the double-cross shots when he’s trying to fade it and he hooks it. I think everyone thought because he won at Bay Hill that he was back; well, he didn’t hit it great at Bay Hill, he hit it OK. And Bay Hill’s not a major.”
ReplyDeleteEarlier, he told me, “When I had him, I’m more of a natural-type teacher, I like to keep what you do naturally and just try to improve on it. I like to let you be creative, which he was good at.” There comes a point where swing changes, no matter how sound and well-intended, can become counterproductive. “Under pressure,” Harmon said, “which swing am I using? What am I thinking? What are my eyes seeing? There’s too much more that goes into it than just the actual swing. He’s changed so many times he may have confused himself.
“And for me, I think he’s lost his nerve putting. I think his nerves are bad, and he’s lost his confidence.”
How can Tiger turn it around? “If he ever asked me what I thought he needed to do, I’d tell him, look, go on the practice tee without anybody—without me, without Sean [Foley, his current coach], without Haney, without a camera, and start hitting golf shots. Hit some high draws, some low draws, high fades, low fades, move the ball up and down, move it around; don’t worry about how you do it and go back to feeling it again. Quit playing golf-swing and just hit shots; just say to himself, I’m gonna hit a low fade, and I don’t need anybody to tell me how to do it, I’m just gonna feel it. He’s Tiger Woods, for God’s sake. He doesn’t know how to hit a shot?” Woods declined to comment.
On his current star pupil: Harmon was at Augusta the recent Sunday when Mickelson’s triple bogey on the fourth hole at the Masters cost him a realistic shot at his fourth green jacket. He was in second place, two shots back, when his tee shot on the long par-three hit the side of the bleachers and bounced back into the trees. Instead of declaring an unplayable lie and going back to the tee, he tried to hack the ball out right-handed, left it in the weeds, came up short again, and wound up with a six.
“It was a bad shot—I’m not making excuses, but he did get very unlucky with how the ball bounced,” Harmon said. “And after that, I thought he played everything so quickly; I said on the commentary [for Sky Sports], ‘Oh my gosh, he’s not taking any time at all.’ Afterwards, when I talked to him about going back to the tee, he said, ‘S—, I’d've probably ended up in the same place.’ Well, that’s one way to look at it.”
Harmon last month put out a two-DVD set, “Butch Harmon: About Golf,” that encompasses the whole of his teachings. He says teaching and coaching are different. “Teaching is creating a mechanical motion, within the framework of who they are and what their body can do,” Harmon told a group of club pros recently. “Coaching is getting through their head. Coaching is relaxing them when they’re nervous.… At major championships, if you watch me work the range with my players, especially once the tournament starts, most of the time I have ‘em laughing. I’m telling them jokes. Because we’re not gonna fix anything 10 minutes before they tee off.”
Said Mickelson: “What’s fun about working with Butch is that it might only take two or three minutes to fix a problem, but hanging around with him for 30 or 45 minutes is so entertaining…I’m always surprised at some of the things that come out of his mouth.”